Leah
I am a lazy gardener who happens to live in MA, too. If it were me, I would leave it alone.
One year, I forgot to protect my dwarf apple trees against bunnies. They gnawed the heck out of a few lower branches, worse than your one spot. The tree healed itself. That branch has lived and produced.
Apples do not get canker. Stone fruit is another story.
I have a cherry tree I got shipped from the nursery with horrible gash marks it still is surviving two years later. It is just not as pretty of a tree. My green gage seems to have a gash mark too and is living just fine.
Just hope you don’t have voles. Voles can feed underground. For that you need hardware cloth going a foot into the soil. Luckiily, we have a smaller number of voles but my friends lost her trees and rose bushes to voles.
We have a few neighborhood cats roaming around a few times a week (not enough to discourage squirrels, unfortunately.
It looks like you have a bunch of scaffolds coming from the same area of the trunk. Consider pruning off that branch, or heading it back to below the wound. Cling wrap might work, but parafilm or buddy tape would do better at sealing it in without disease. If you are not organic, you might treat the wound with Immunox before you wrap it. I would trim away those threads with a razor, because they are more likely rot.
Also, take a deep breath and stop worrying. You have other scaffold branches to build off of.
We have a chipmunk who eats all of my bulbs and scolds us from the safety of the drainage pipe - but I’ll admit to a soft place in my heart for him, and made sure to leave a blanket of leaves on his bank over the winter.
The other fruit trees have done ok so far, except the cherry branch I myself carelessly nicked.
You must be doing bulbs like tulips. From my understanding things like crocus and daffodils are poisonous to animals so they avoid it. At least that is my case. The tulips are eaten over night and the daffodils go unbothered.
Wait until you witness chipmunks eating your berries (strawberries, blueberries) and climb up fruit trees to steal fruit, you may like him less. I hate them.
Chipmunks/squirrels are the reason I have to eat my strawberry at less optimal times. I tried netting them. The squirrels/chipmunks seem to figure out ways around things you put in the way unlike birds.
It’ll heal, if it was stone fruit I’d be more concerned because it could be an entry point for disease. However, as noted it might need to be pruned off regardless.
I have a vole living in some grass between two beds of garlic, it will go nowhere near the garlic so it seems to be stuck where it is. I find it very funny after losing many crops to voles over the past few years. I have a very successful kestrel that hunts nearby, so I’ll let it take care of it
So maybe planting garlic around trees could protect them, especially since it’s not a very nutrient demanding plant.
